David Copeland (@davetron5000), author of GLI (Git-like Inter­face Com­mand Parser) has writ­ten a book called Build Awe­some Command-Line Appli­ca­tions in Ruby. I've been beta-testing the book while it was going through the pub­lish­ing process, and it is excel­lent. Of note: it focuses on writ­ing com­mand suites (like the rails com­mand or git) and stand-alone command-line appli­ca­tions (like rsync).

So like I men­tioned up there, I ini­tially grabbed the book around its sec­ond or third beta release, fig­ur­ing that while it was still in the process of becom­ing a Real Book I some­times feel like I'm still in the process of becom­ing a Real Admin so, you know, what the hell, let's work through it together.

I know a num­ber of devel­op­ers who only know Ruby in the con­text of the Rails frame­work (and maybe related Rake tasks) and this book is an excep­tional guide to using Ruby for more than just Rails appli­ca­tions. Command-line tool­ing has long been an area of inter­est for me as work­ing in oper­a­tions means often hav­ing to per­form a num­ber of repet­i­tive tasks which lend them­selves well to being scripted; good admins write good scripts. More stray obser­va­tions after the jump →.